Pinned topicBest Way To Replace a v7000 with a v7000 ?

‏2013-06-20T11:11:33Z
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Looking for the best way to replace a v7000 with a v7000...... why ? v7000 System A is coming off lease & will be sent back to leasing company. Need to install v7000 System B and move all data from v7k A to v7k B..... about 150TB worth. Which begs the question...... what is best / easiest way to do this ?

Some obvious options:

install v7k B along side v7k A.... and do Host Mirroring from v7k A to v7k B. (doable but very labor intensive)

establish Remote Copy - Metro Mirror between v7k B and v7k A

externalize the v7k A BEHIND the v7k B and have v7k B migrate the data (is this even supported ? my guess is >> no)

buy an SVC and put both v7k A and v7k B behind the SVC & use SVC to migrate the data

Re: Best Way To Replace a v7000 with a v7000 ?

Do you have enough free FC ports available on your SAN to be able to have both control enclosures (assuming each is just a single control enclosure) connected at the same time?

If so then you could consider adding the new control enclosure as an additional I/O group, creating a clustered system. You could then use the non-disruptive volume move procedure to move the host access over onto the new enclosure (or distruptive, if the host OS types involved don't support doing this without downtime), and remove the host mappings to the original enclosure. You then use the migrate or vdisk mirroring functions of the V7000 to move the volume data from the old storage pool(s) to the new storage pool(s). At that point you can remove the original control enclosure from the clustered system and return to just one as before.

Obviously there might be some caveats and other hoops to jump through if you have copy services and iSCSI host attachments etc, but just an idea to add to your list. The key thing about this approach is that it can be performed without requiring any downtime.

Re: Best Way To Replace a v7000 with a v7000 ?

Do you have enough free FC ports available on your SAN to be able to have both control enclosures (assuming each is just a single control enclosure) connected at the same time?

If so then you could consider adding the new control enclosure as an additional I/O group, creating a clustered system. You could then use the non-disruptive volume move procedure to move the host access over onto the new enclosure (or distruptive, if the host OS types involved don't support doing this without downtime), and remove the host mappings to the original enclosure. You then use the migrate or vdisk mirroring functions of the V7000 to move the volume data from the old storage pool(s) to the new storage pool(s). At that point you can remove the original control enclosure from the clustered system and return to just one as before.

Obviously there might be some caveats and other hoops to jump through if you have copy services and iSCSI host attachments etc, but just an idea to add to your list. The key thing about this approach is that it can be performed without requiring any downtime.

If the V7000 systems are both running the latest software version then a V7000 system can virtualise another V7000 system, provided that one of them is in the storage layer and the other in the replication layer.

Assuming you've not changed the layer setting from the default of 'storage' on the current system then you'd need to set that to 'replication'. Once you've done that then you can let the two systems see each other and the new system would appear as a storage controller to the current system.

There is some information about layers in the Information Center here:

I guess that the sort of process would be to create identical size vdisks on the new system (which will be seen as mdisks on the existing system), then add each as an image mode copy. Once synchronised you can remove the host mapping from the current enclosure, delete the volume, remove the vdisk mapping in the new control enclosure and create it to the host.

Re: Best Way To Replace a v7000 with a v7000 ?

If the V7000 systems are both running the latest software version then a V7000 system can virtualise another V7000 system, provided that one of them is in the storage layer and the other in the replication layer.

Assuming you've not changed the layer setting from the default of 'storage' on the current system then you'd need to set that to 'replication'. Once you've done that then you can let the two systems see each other and the new system would appear as a storage controller to the current system.

There is some information about layers in the Information Center here:

I guess that the sort of process would be to create identical size vdisks on the new system (which will be seen as mdisks on the existing system), then add each as an image mode copy. Once synchronised you can remove the host mapping from the current enclosure, delete the volume, remove the vdisk mapping in the new control enclosure and create it to the host.

On the surface, the "layers" option seems somewhat complex for my purposes..... but I'll keep an open mind & do a lot more reading. I'm still in the planning stages but adding the new v7k into my cluster seems very promising.